In Vol. 2, the Guardians of the Galaxy Are Still Singing a Delightfully Different Tune

As the thinking goes, the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are Marvel movies without really being Marvel movies. They haven’t yet been woven into the broader Avengers narrative that’s swiftly devouring the world, or at least cinema. Instead, Guardians exists as a semi-independent side narrative. So until they’re inevitably drawn into the larger mythology, they get to be the funny movies, the weird movies, the idiosyncratic movies. The ones that feel a bit more auteurish. That was the unexpected pleasure of James Gunn’s first Guardians film, a vivid and rollicking space opera-lite. The movie, with its talking raccoon and tree person and 70s-rock soundtrack, was silly but assured, an effectively whimsical abstraction built on Marvel and Disney’s sturdy chassis. It was, deservedly, a big hit.

And so comes Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, inching the series ever closer to converging with the adventures of Iron Man and all his glib friends. I went into Vol. 2 assuming that the first film’s slick verve would still be intact—Gunn is back as writer-director—but that it would have a harder gleam to it, more buffed by corporate hands. In some ways, I was right. As is true of most comedy sequels, Vol. 2 leans hard on the jokes that worked in the first film, to diminishing returns. Dave Bautista’s Drax was a funny surprise in the original—this colossus talking in stilted but elevated fashion, blunt and insensitive and oddly vulnerable. Vol. 2 returns to that well again and again, and while Bautista is admirably game, less Drax would have done a lot more. As would less Baby Groot, and probably fewer kicky pop-culture references.

Some of Vol. 2’s action sequences are also overdone, particularly the finale battle between Chris Pratt’s Star Lord/Peter Quill and . . . well, I won’t spoil who. But just know that the loud and long sequence gradually becomes yet another of superhero filmdom’s senseless tempests, logic invented—or forgotten—as necessary. It’s not unexciting, exactly. But as the battle wears on, it grows formless, sapped of tension. We want our trusty heroes to just hurry up and get through it, as we know most of them will.

So Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 fails to avoid some of the familiar pitfalls of sequel and tentpole filmmaking. But here’s the strange thing: that clunkiness is made up for by more than a few sections of the film that are downright moving. For all its quippy snark, what makes Vol. 2 work as well as it does is its deep sincerity, its sweetness, its quaint and cozy musings on friendship and family. Guardians is competing with another big franchise on that front—but unlike Dom Toretto and his Furious gang, Peter and his pals don’t really add any swagger to their expressions of love and commitment. Vol. 2’s sentiment is earnest and simple, a shaggy kind of amity. It’s very charming, the way Peter and Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and the rest bicker and bond and persevere together.

At first I found their snappy rapport a little irritating—perhaps because I didn’t really remember much of the first film’s social dynamics, and Vol. 2 assumes not just familiarity, but adoration. Some unlucky few of us may remember how in American Reunion, every 10 or so minutes some character from the first American Pie movie would come sauntering into the frame to make a little cameo. The audience was supposed to be thrilled, but mostly the reaction was, “Oh, right, him,” because no one really remembered or cared about how, say, the Shermanator fit into that world’s structure. Vol. 2 has a similar trust that everyone in the audience is a die-hard fan, which comes off smug and grating. But my annoyance only lasted for a short while; soon enough I was happily bouncing along on Gunn’s ride, a cosmic and existential yarn about fathers and sons and sisters and friends.

I’m going light on plot here because that tends to be the best rule of thumb when talking about Marvel films. But I think it’s safe to say, given that it was in the trailers, that Kurt Russell plays Peter’s long lost dad, a spaceman of mysterious extraction who arrives to tell his son something big. Yondu (Michael Rooker), Peter’s former gang leader and de facto father figure, also features prominently, as does Nebula (Karen Gillan), who’s got some scores to settle with her sister, Gamora. It’s a crowded movie, but Gunn manages to keep things pretty balanced, building toward an emotional denouement that really lands, even when it kinda shouldn’t. The cast—which also includes the always wonderful Elizabeth Debicki as a gold-covered priestess—certainly helps on that front, especially Cooper, who delivers a peppy and full-bodied vocal performance that may, curiously, be my favorite thing he’s done since Wet Hot American Summer.

Though it verges on gimmick, Gunn’s reliance on retro rock songs to score the Guardians films is still disarmingly effective, particularly a repeated use of Fleetwood Mac’s thumping, propulsive “The Chain” and Cat Stevens’s wistful “Father and Son.” In coupling these songs with his bright, ornate visuals, Gunn conjures up some moments—a delirious fight, a zipping rocketship chase, a funeral full of fireworks—that are genuinely worthy of the term “space opera.” They’re gorgeous interludes that are artful in a way none of the other Marvel films have ever dared to be, or were maybe not allowed to be. Vol. 2 is messy and a tad self-indulgent, but it’s also a work of actual vision, relatively free from the onus of neatly interlocking with a raft of other properties.

But the days of of the Guardians’ independence are numbered. They’re slated to appear in next year’s Avengers: Infinity War, which could spell doom. Not that the Avengers movies are bad—many of them are good, in fact. It’s just that it’s been so nice having the Guardians all the way out there in some other galaxy, given room to be eccentric and personal. Ah well. No use worrying about a future we can’t change. Like the omnipotent force threatening the universe in Vol. 2, the Marvel machine will inevitably absorb the Guardians, as it absorbs all things. Soon it will be time for the team to fall in line, to fulfill their ultimate synergistic purpose. So we might as well appreciate something a little different while we still can. Vol. 2 is certainly worth that. Gunn has made an invigorating, overstuffed light show that hones itself into something rather striking by the end. And, yes, Baby Groot is pretty cute.